New remote work policies prove Silicon Valley companies are run by visionless cowards

The companies that make remote work tools want you to use them -- so they don't have to!

Yesterday's Silicon Valley just saved the world. Too bad today's Silicon Valley doesn't have the courage to eat its own dog food or the vision to embrace its own solutions. 

Let me explain by way of a thought experiment. 

Imagine if the covid pandemic hit 30 years earlier. The remote work solution to a total business shutdown would have been impossible. There was no web in 1990. Most people had never even heard of email, let alone Slack or Zoom. There were no smartphones or tablets. Only 15% of American homes had any kind of personal computer at all. 

It took many years to develop a vaccine in 1990 — the mRNA technology was in its infancy and decades away from being ready for an actual vaccine. 

There could have been no widespread connected remote work, and the quarantine without work would have lasted many years. A 1990 covid pandemic would have been attended by famine, economic depression, mass death and societal failure. 

But we got lucky. Thanks to the general advance of technology and the specific innovations of Silicon Valley companies like Apple, Google, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, Broadcom and many others, our 2020 covid pandemic offered the partial escape hatch of remote work at scale. Millions of American workers kept the white collar part of the economy humming by using Silicon Valley's products of cloud services and applications, internet connectivity and resources, software, WiFi, mobile devices, video meetings and myriad other communication options and much more. 

Technology breeds culture. Once these workers got a taste of remote work, most found it preferable to commuting to a sick building or office park, and are reluctant to return now that vaccines make it safe. 

Now every organization that embraced pandemic-driven remote work for employees now faces the demand for a new, post-pandemic remote work policy. The options are: 1) bring everyone back; 2) keep everyone remote; or 2) some hybrid work policy of part-time remote. 

The choice also applies to the very Silicon Valley companies that saved us all by inventing, building and distributing the tools that enabled remote work over the past 30 years. So where is Silicon Valley landing on their own remote work policies? 

Apple, Google and Amazon are all requiring most employees to return to work three days a week, but they can work from home two days a week. Other tech companies are also offering mostly hybrid solutions.

Very rare in Silicon Valley: Blanket approval for remote work for anyone who wants it. 

Here's the problem. If employees are required to show up at the office more than once per week, they can't move away from Silicon Valley. And living remotely is the best thing about working remotely.

Silicon Valley is a crowded, polluted, overpopulated and extremely expensive place to live. Commutes take forever, and they're dangerous because of a culture of road-rage and aggressive driving. The valley is, for the most part, a soul-crushing wasteland of bland and generic strip malls and office parks.

The greatest perk Silicon Valley companies could offer is to let employees live somewhere else.

More to the point, where's Silicon Valley's vision? Where is the leadership? 

The companies that make the tools for remote work should embrace those tools and the lifestyle transformation they have enabled.

In other words, Apple is essentially telling us that their laptops, iMacs, cameras, software and other products aren't good enough to make remote work great. 

Google is telling us with their remote work policy that Google Workspace, Google Meet and other remote work tools are fine for other companies, but not good enough for Google.

What Silicon Valley companies should be doing is demonstrating cultural leadership by saying: Our digital tools are so amazing that we're going to use them to let our employees live and work anywhere in the world, and our company will succeed because of the effectiveness of those tools. Our tools, they should be saying, call for new ways to manage people, new ways to collaborate, new ways to measure performance, and we're going to show the world what those new ways are because our products are so great. 

But they're not doing that. Because today's generation of Silicon Valley leaders lack vision. And they're cowards. And they're afraid of innovation. 

What a disappointment.